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I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

I certainly think I'll end up writing about America in some form. I've taken plenty of notes. I like America very much.

I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.

Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

I came to America, and I made good. It's an old story, but it hasn't been told in a long time. Usually, it's, 'I'm an immigrant, I came here and got persecuted.' My story is I came here, I worked hard, and it worked out all right. So it's still available.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.